Larry Doby, Who Broke a Color Barrier, Dies at 79

By CLAIRE SMITH

Published: June 19, 2003

Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the American League in 1947, three months after Jackie Robinson became the first black in modern major league baseball, died Wednesday night at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 79.

The cause was complications of cancer, a granddaughter, Nicole Frasier, said.

Doby, who was promoted to the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947, eventually became the second black to manage a major league team and became a member of the Hall of Fame. But his arrival in the major leagues was overshadowed by Robinson's debut.

"The only difference was that Jackie Robinson got all the publicity," Doby later said. "You didn't hear much about what I was going through because the media didn't want to repeat the same story."

Doby was destined to stay in Robinson's broad shadow for most of his career, and it took a half-century for baseball to fully examine his contributions, which included being named an All-Star seven times in a 13-year playing career in addition to his managerial appointment.

By 1997, baseball was honoring not only Robinson but also Doby, who by then had served as special adviser to commissioners and league presidents.

Lawrence Eugene Doby was born on Dec. 13, 1923, in Camden, S.C. The son of a semipro baseball player, he was an all-state athlete in football, basketball and baseball at Paterson Eastside High School in New Jersey, then continued his athletic career at Long Island University.

Doby's early experiences in relatively integrated northeast New Jersey could not prepare him for the discrimination that awaited him in other places. He often spoke of how stunned and embarrassed he was when he arrived for training upon induction into the Navy in 1944 only to be segregated from whites he had played with and even served as captain for on teams while growing up.

Doby played for the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues from 1942 to 1943 and 1946 to 1947, before and after his military service.

In 1946, Doby, a 6-foot-1, left-handed-hitting second baseman, batted .341 and was an accomplished power hitter.

That caught the attention of the Indians' owner, Bill Veeck, who had decided to join the Dodgers' general manager, Branch Rickey, in breaking the unwritten rule against signing nonwhite players, assuring the integration of both major leagues.

Doby, who lost his father when he was 8 years old, regarded Veeck, who signed him as an infielder, as a second father. "He didn't see color," Doby said of Veeck in an interview with The New York Times in 1997. "To me, he was in every sense, colorblind. And I always knew he was there for me. He always seemed to know when things were bad, if things were getting to me. He'd call up and say, `Let's go out, let's get something to eat.' "

Veeck was more than just kind. He also wielded a hammer when needed. When Doby was first introduced to the Indians players by Lou Boudreau, then their player-manager, several players refused to shake his hand.

"The next year Bill Veeck eliminated about five of the guys who were discourteous to me," Doby told Art Rust Jr., author of "Get That Nigger Off the Field; An Informal History of the Black Man in Baseball" (Delacorte, 1976).

Though there was an element of fear involved because of death threats against Robinson and Doby, the players eventually settled into major league life. Lesser burdens like loneliness and isolation were persistent. Robinson did his best to help Doby prepare for the institutionalized segregation that awaited him around the country.

"When I arrived in Cleveland, Jackie Robinson called, and the first thing we discussed was the hotel and the food situation," Doby told Rust. "These were the two most important things. After you play a hard game of ball and you want to sit down and eat and you have to have your family with you and you can't, it really bothers you.

"We put up with this in the Negro Leagues, but now that we were major leaguers we wanted the same treatment as the white players. This bugged us more than anything else."

Doby appeared in only 29 games in 1947, but by the following season, he was playing the outfield full time and excelled, batting .301 for the pennant-winning Indians.

Doby went on to hit .318 in the Indians' World Series victory over the Boston Braves, starring in Game 2 (a single, a double and a run batted in) and winning Game 4 with a 400-foot homer off Boston's Johnny Sain.

By 1950, Doby was a bona fide All-Star, hitting .326. He led the American League in home runs in both 1952 and 1954, with 32 in each season. Doby also drove in 126 runs to lead the league in 1954, when he helped lead the Indians to another pennant.

All told, Doby drove in 100 or more runs five times, hit 253 homers and batted .283 in a 13-year career that included time with the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.

After brief stints in the minor leagues and in the Japanese major leagues, Doby went on to coach for the Montreal Expos, the Indians and the White Sox.

In 1978, Veeck, then the owner of the White Sox, called on Doby to replace Bob Lemon as manager for the final four months of the season, making Doby only the second black to be a major league manager, after Frank Robinson, now the Expos' manager, who managed the Indians in 1975.

Doby posted a 37-50 record managing the White Sox, who finished fifth in their division.

Doby is survived by a son, Larry Jr., of Montclair; four daughters, Christina Fearrington, of Edison, N.J., Leslie Feggan, of West Orange, N.J., and Kimberly Martin and Susan Robinson, both of Montclair; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His wife, Helyn, died in 2001.

At countless sites, including the All-Star Game, Doby, quiet and dignified throughout, never lost focus on what he considered the real triumphs of 1947.

"It was a learning lesson for baseball and the country," said Doby, who was voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1998. "If we all look back, we can see that baseball helped make this a better country for us all, a more comfortable country for us all.

"Kids are our future and we hope baseball has given them some idea of what it is to live together and how we can get along, whether you be black or white."

In looking back on his career, Doby once recalled a moment that stood out amid the discrimination he had faced. It came after Game 4 of the 1948 World Series.

"I hit a home run off Johnny Sain to help Steve Gromek win, and in the clubhouse the photographers took a picture of Gromek and me hugging," Doby told Dave Anderson of The Times in 1987. "That picture went all over the country. I think it was one of the first, if not the first, of a black guy and a white guy hugging, just happy because they won a ballgame."